Digitized Ladino Library Introduction

At the request of Professor Aron Rodrigue, I am pleased to write this
Introduction to the Digitized Ladino Library project initiated by Stanford
University. As natives of Istanbul, he and I share the same Eastern Sephardic
background of Ladino speakers whose number has been on a steady decline since
the end of World War II. The suffering and destruction inflicted on the Jewish
people spared no one. Particularly harsh was the situation of East Mediterranean
Jewry, whose cultural heritage was severely damaged, with Salonika almost wiped
off the map, and its rabbinical academies and libraries decimated.

The purpose of this Digitized Ladino Library is to place on the Internet a
corpus of Ladino printed books, or even a few manuscripts, for easy access by
scholars as well as students of Ladino throughout the world. I had already
worked on a number of Ladino books in the past and I was delighted when
Professor Rodrigue wished to include these books in this new series.

For the reader, here is a brief description of my contribution to this
project:

1. Kanunnâme de Penas is the Ladino translation by Judge Yehezkel
Gabbay of the first Ottoman Legal Code adopted in 1860, in the aftermath of the
Hatt-i Hümayun promulgated in 1839. The text is presented in square
Hebrew characters, as well as in Romanized form with a full glossary of all
legal Turkish terms. The underlying Ottoman-Turkish text in the Arabic script
and its transliteration into Modern Turkish characters, is in preparation.

2. Poezias Ebraikas de Rosh ha-Shana i Yom Kippur is a popular
compilation in Ladino by Rabbi Reuven Eliyahu Yisrael of piyyutim
chanted during the High Holidays. Rabbi Yisrael was born in Rhodes, spent his
life in Kraiova, Rumania, and returned to Rhodes as its last Chief Rabbi. His
Ladino is saturated with Gallicisms made fashionable by those educated in the
schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, yet universally derided by those
who had not been exposed to it. He even provides a brief glossary for those with
no knowledge of French!

3. From Ottoman Turkish to Ladino features a unique Ladino pamphlet
on morality by the same Judge Yehezkel Gabbay, known up to now only as the
founder of the Djurnal Yisraelit. In this project of translation, Judge
Gabbay was inspired by his illustrious colleague, the former Ottoman Ambassador
to Austria, Mehmet Sâdik Rif'at Pasha, whose Risâle-i Ahlâk or
"Pamphlet on Morality" represented, to my knowledge, the first departure from
the traditional Muslim custom of discussing morality on the twin foundations of
the Qur'ân and the Hadith exclusively. Apparently, these two enlightened
individuals, already in the middle of the nineteenth century, were appalled by
the inadequacy of the rote method used in the medreses and the yeshivoth. With
this modest pamphlet as a catalyst, they hoped to unleash enlightenment among
their respective co-religionists. Rif'at Pasha's shunning of any reference to
shari'a was matched by Gabbay's equally amazing silence on
halakha. While Rif'at Pasha's endeavor was short-lived due to his
premature death, Yehezkel Gabbay did get into trouble with the rabbinic
establishment in Istanbul.

Similar to what happened with the Kanunnâme, Gabbay's Ladino had to
be forced to express Turkish concepts. Even when Gabbay must turn to Turkish, he
may prefer a word different from the one he has been struggling with, such as
his use of dalkaukluk to translate arsizlik (p. 12). But when
he picks the Hebrew enoshiyyuth for the Ottoman-Turkish
ünsiyyet, he clearly shows that he is no light-weight (p. 23).

4. The Selihoth of the Sepharadim, originally self-published by
Joseph Alschech in Vienna in 1865, is, to my knowledge, the first bilingual,
Hebrew-Ladino Sephardic Selihoth book produced by Eastern Sepharadim.
Its methodology is the traditional verbum e verbo or palavra por
palavra approach used by Jews since the days of the Septuagint in
Alexandria and continued in the various Targumim throughout the ages. When
recently this characteristic of Ladino texts was compared to the artificial
literality of interlinear Greek and Latin classics, the erroneous and misleading
conclusion was reached that its sole aim was pedagogical, i.e. to teach Hebrew
to children!

Yet, reacting to the same literality, Jerome observed that, verborum ordo
mysterium est, "the order of the words is the mystery." And well before
him, Rabbi Akiba was known for insisting that the entire minutia in Holy
Scripture serve to convey a hidden meaning worth unlocking.

Alschech's language rests on well-known Hebrew paradigms; he needs no French
words to impress the pious. Its flow is steady and pleasing because those who
use it can follow mentally the underlying Hebrew text they have learned since
childhood. Pushing the metaphor, one can say that after five centuries of
isolation, Ladino became a Semitic language with a Spanish vocabulary. In
sentence construction, too, the fuller syntax of Spanish gave way to the simpler
paratax of Semitic languages, where the basic declarative sentence of Hebrew is
the norm as reflected in the King James Bible that has shaped the English
language so well.

5. Initially, The Song of Songs in the Targumic Tradition was
intended as a textbook for the study of the Aramaic Targum of the Song of Songs.
Then, it became apparent that the Ladino version of this Targum in Roman
characters, entitled Paraphrasis Caldaica, Amsterdam 1664, along with
Avraham Asa's, Constantinople 1744 Romanized Ladino version, as well as my own
1992 modern Ladino version, could be a welcome addition.

By the time the layout of these five texts, i.e. the Aramaic Targum, my
English translation, the Paraphrasis of 1664, Asa's version of 1744,
and my 1992 revised Ladino version, was finalized, a rare bonanza crossed my
path when I found yet another Ladino version in fully vocalized, square Hebrew
letters! It had been included in Rabbi Abraham Laniado's mystical commentary on
the Song of Songs, entitled Nequdoth ha-Kasef, Venice 1619,
itself copied from an earlier, Salonika 1600, Ladino version.

Finally, for this to be a balanced study tool what was missing was a text in
the Rashi script. This I found in Israel Hayyim's Vienna 1814 edition for which
yet another Romanization was provided. In the Remarks on the Ladino Versions,
each component is briefly evaluated, followed by a comparative Ladino-English
Glossary of Select Lexical Items.